Politics|Kushner Sees a Problem in Trump’s Fund-Raising, but Not Everyone Agrees

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Kushner Sees a Problem in Trump’s Fund-Raising, but Not Everyone Agrees

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Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, has cast a disapproving eye on the fund-raising apparatus run primarily by the Republican National Committee.CreditCreditAmr Alfiky for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — His plan for ending a 35-day government shutdown failed to deliver a compromise.

His immigration proposal was greeted by congressional Democrats and Republicans alike as dead on arrival.

And what promised to be the “deal of the century” — the Middle East peace plan he has been pursuing in secret for more than two years — is in trouble even before it has been officially announced, seen more as a way of supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel than of getting Palestinians to the bargaining table. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo privately described it as “unexecutable.”

Amid policy missteps and at the risk of frustrating President Trump, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has set his sights on what he has described to people as a new problem in need of his attention: fund-raising for Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Specifically, Mr. Kushner has cast a disapproving eye on the fund-raising apparatus run primarily by the Republican National Committee, and its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, whose close relationship with Mr. Trump is said to irk him. At a dinner he organized last month in the White House residence, Mr. Kushner brought together Ms. McDaniel; Brad Parscale, the campaign manager; and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who ran Mr. Trump’s fund-raising in 2016, along with a group of big donors like Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, to discuss the fund-raising strategy for 2020.

But there was no broad agreement among the people there that the campaign is having any trouble raising money from large donors, as Mr. Kushner suggested.

In fact, R.N.C. officials noted, the committee is on track to have raised roughly $400 million since 2017, compared with the Democratic National Committee’s $203.2 million in the same time frame. Reading the room, Mr. Kushner tried to turn the meeting over to Ms. McDaniel, but she replied that she was not the one who had organized it.

The dinner was described by a half-dozen people with knowledge of what took place. They also noted that Mr. Kushner scheduled it in the private residence without extending an invitation to the first lady, Melania Trump, or Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor who served as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2016.

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An intern working at Mr. Trump’s campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va. The Republican committee is on track to have raised roughly $400 million since 2017.CreditJason Andrew for The New York Times

Mr. Kushner, allies said, is eager to take control of the fund-raising for personal and strategic reasons. He and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, have always described themselves to others as some of the only people in the White House who truly have Mr. Trump’s best interests at heart. And with a frequent ally in the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and the Mueller investigation finally in the rearview mirror, Mr. Kushner’s associates describe him as experiencing a new sense of influence in the White House.

But Mr. Kushner’s aggressive involvement has also been described as something of a defensive move: By positioning himself as the point person on raising money for the campaign, he prevents antagonists and potential rivals from taking over a job that comes with great power and proximity to the president.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has seemed uninterested in discussing the state of the fund-raising for 2020, or in hearing Mr. Kushner’s concerns at last month’s dinner. After regaling the group with stories about his foreign trips and past business ventures, the president left the meeting, declaring, “As long as we’re breaking records, I don’t care.”

A person close to Mr. Kushner, who was not authorized to speak publicly, insisted it was the president who had initially pitched the idea of a “thank you” dinner for staff members. But it morphed into an opportunity for Mr. Kushner, who has helped oversee an effort to attract more online small donors, to present himself to Mr. Trump as the person with the best solutions.

During the meal, Ms. McDaniel explained the party committee’s fund-raising goals for 2019, and Mr. Kushner countered that they were insufficient. For the last few months, people involved in fund-raising for the campaign have complained that it is hard to plan effectively when the White House gives little lead time for committing to dates. A major donor dinner in New York this month, for instance, was put together with just six days’ notice.

In a statement, Mr. Kushner said that he harbored no concerns about the committee’s performance. “The R.N.C. under Ronna’s leadership has done historic work and President Trump is well served with her at the helm,” he said.

And the committee, according to Michael Ahrens, a spokesman, “has a great working relationship with the team at the White House.” He added that it is “because of President Trump’s long list of accomplishments and the leadership of Chairwoman McDaniel that we’re able to break fund-raising records month after month.”

Mr. Kushner’s dual roles as aide and son-in-law have proved to be unusually long-lasting in a turbulent White House. He has been involved in every major decision by the president, including some that have been problematic like firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, and deciding how to handle relations with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

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Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s chairwoman. Her close relationship with Mr. Trump is said to irk Mr. Kushner.CreditPaul Sancya/Associated Press

Despite criticism and defeats, Mr. Kushner has always showed complete confidence in his own problem-solving abilities, in part, associates said, because of the role he played as a behind-the-scenes strategist on Mr. Trump’s winning 2016 campaign. And while many of his colleagues have resented his position, Mr. Kushner’s allies say that he has not been afraid to take on some of the most difficult issues confronting the White House and that he is someone whom Mr. Trump continues to rely on and trust.

Those allies say that Mr. Kushner has described himself as the real force behind the 2020 re-election campaign.

Mr. Kushner speaks every day to Mr. Parscale and, according to White House officials, his headliner appearance at the Republican National Committee’s spring donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago was meant to underscore the large role that Mr. Kushner would assume in planning, coordinating and becoming a public face of the campaign.

Mr. Kushner and campaign officials have sold the president on running for re-election, in part, on criminal justice reform, the one issue on which Mr. Kushner’s efforts paid off with a win for the president. Mr. Kushner and others have told the president that passage of the First Step Act, as the criminal reform legislation is known, would help him win over African-American voters in 2020.

Mr. Kushner’s role in helping win bipartisan support for the bill was a highlight of his often-turbulent tenure working as a government official.

In the last two and a half years, he has been dogged by questions about his continuing involvement in his family’s business, the investigation into the Trump campaign by the special counsel and problems obtaining his top-secret security clearance, which Mr. Trump ultimately directed White House officials to grant him. There has also been on-and-off grousing from his father-in-law, who has told aides that he wanted his daughter and son-in-law to move back to New York.

In a rare interview with a reporter from the website Axios that aired on HBO on Sunday night, Mr. Kushner appeared unfazed by the investigation. He shrugged off a question about whether he would alert the F.B.I. if people connected to Russia offered to help the campaign in 2020, something he and others did not do in 2016. It is a “hypothetical,” he said.

And he indicated that he believed he was in the White House on his own merits, not because of his marriage to Mr. Trump’s daughter.

“The president wouldn’t have been able to get me to work on his campaign had it not been for familial relations and I guess because I’m related to him, people will make that accusation one way or the other,” Mr. Kushner said. “I do think I’ve got a good track record in all the things I’ve done.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Kushner Sets Sights on Fund-Raising for Trump’s Re-election Campaign. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe